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Equipment Sharing and Management System

About this site

This site was built to review data held about equipment at the University of Leeds. This was part of a project assessing the feasability of using the equipment module in the University’s publications management system (Symplectic) as an equipment catalogue. Data was gathered from various sources, then combined and processed. The data can be updated with exports from the University’s Enterprise Resource Planning system (SAP).

2023 Update

The Equipment data service at JISC was updated in 2023 and can accept updates from participating institutions. Equipment data for the University of Leeds was compiled on this site in Uniquip format and sent to JISC in 2023. The dataset now contains 2137 items of equipment - all registered in SAP. Where possible, pieces of equipment have extended descriptions, images and taxonomies applied to them (which cannot be registerd in SAP) from the old ESMS system. Data on this site will be used to keep the JISC service up-to-date - harvesting and data integrity information are available here.

Data sources

The data on this website is from SAP and the old ESMS website at esms.leeds.ac.uk, which was scraped on Thursday 9th December 2021. The ESMS system was non-operational for parts of 2021 and is now offline. Additional data was sourced from data.leeds.ac.uk, www.n8equipment.org.uk and the old JISC equipment site and integrated into the original SAP and ESMS data.

  • The esms.leeds.ac.uk site got its original data from SAP, and this was enhanced by staff at the University. Images and decriptions were added to records, and they were placed in an equipment taxonomy used by the N8. In 2021 the site was broken, and there was evidence that the mechanism it used to get data from SAP was non-operational, and had been so for some time. The esms.leeds.ac.uk site identified 1664 items of equipment.
  • The data.leeds.ac.uk site had linked data files identifying 1308 items of equipment and 1816 images associated with them.
  • The www.n8equipment.org.uk site identified 1283 items of equipment, but its paging mechanism was broken. It got its data from one of the feeds at data.leeds.ac.uk.
  • The old JISC equipment site at equipment.data.ac.uk identified 1283 items, indicating it also got its data from data.leeds.ac.uk or www.n8equipment.org.uk. The data on this site could be accessed in TTL (turtle) format - other export formats were broken.
  • SAP identified 1303 items in 2021, the bulk of which were also in the ESMS data. The ESMS data had an additional 16 items not in the SAP data, and the SAP data had 377 items not found in the ESMS data.